ell, if mistakes were a physical thing, we could have spread them on every slice of a loaf. And put it on thick. Goofup sandwiches for everyone.

I mean, pretty much everyone was B-listing on today’s session.

The dispatcher was cratering on the panel, just struggling to get traffic moving. And across the division, mistakes were rampant. I saw trains sitting on wrong tracks, trains dropping cars at the wrong place, paperwork going into the wrong boxes, even trains T-boning other trains.

Got in an argument with the superintendent about my train taking the wrong yard exit track. But no, I was wrong. But wait, I was actually right (and too far along to correct it). So, yes, I pulled a cut of Georgia limestone (is there such a thing) southbound rather than lugging it northbound. We just ran with it. And frankly, given the cockups going on across the lower deck, I wasn’t going to argue.

And just to show that I’m not wafting on angelic wings looking down over this apocalypse, I was caught pre-dropping box cars on industrial track where they shouldn’t be. And I backed over a couple of turnouts I’d not set correctly. And I got in the way of the Juice Train (though I was told to refer to my timetable on this, where the Juice Train is mysteriously absent). Even had one engine run away and smash into another train working on the main. So yeah, ops on the Florida East Coast was like the last reel of a Stooges movie.

Not sure what was going on in the yard. It was probably fine. Given our stagnant train throughput, they certainly should have been able to keep up.

And poor Ken – at one point he came in and I thought he looked like Father Christmas looking over a workshop of idiot, scrabbling elves.

On the plus side, after all this, with trains that never finished (even though they had four real hours to do it), with trains on the ground and even in trees, it was still a good session. And that’s the great thing about the cooperative game of model train operations. We all win. Or we all look inanely stupid. Together. A team.

Great fun!

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